I am collecting poets :-)

In Mind

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but

fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without
ostentation-

but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs

but she is not kind.

--Denise Levertov

Destiny

They deliver the edicts of God
without delay
And are exempt from apprehension
from detention
And with their God-given
Petasus, Caduceus, and Talaria
ferry like bolts of lightning
unhindered between the tribunals
of Space and Time

The Messenger-Spirit
in human flesh
is assigned a dependable,
self-reliant, versatile,
thoroughly poet existence
upon its sojourn in life

It does not knock
or ring the bell
or telephone
When the Messenger-Spirit
comes to your door
though locked
It'll enter like an electric midwife
and deliver the message

There is no tell
throughout the ages
that a Messenger-Spirit
ever stumbled into darkness

--Gregory Corso

The Window

you are my bread
and the hairline noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea

you are not stone
or molten sound
I think
you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backwards
and this love
breaks on a windowpane
where no light talks

this is not the time
for crossing tongues
(the sand here
never shifts)

I think
tomorrow
turned you with his toe
and you will
shine
and shine
unspent and underground

--Diane di Prima

more later...

(no subject)

*NIGHT, THE EGG AND EROS

Another story of the beginning of things was passed down in the sacred writings preserved by the disciples and devotees of the singer Orpheus. But latterly it is to be found only in the works of a writer of comedy, and in certain references to it by philosophers. At first it was more commonly told amongst hunters and forest-dwellers than amongst our sea-coast people. in the beginning was Night -- so this story runs -- or, in our language, Nyx.
Homer, too, regarded her as one of the greatest goddesses, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in sacred awe. According to this story, she was a bird with black wings. Ancient Night conceived of the Wind and laid her silver Egg in the gigantic lap of Darkness. From the Egg sprang the son of the rushing Wind, a god with golden wings. He is called Eros, the god of love; but this is only one name, the loveliest of all the names this god bore.

The god's other names, such of them as we still know, sound very scholastic, but even they refer only to particular details of the old story. His name of Protogonos means only that he was the "firstborn" of all gods. His name of Phanes exactly explains what he did when he was hatched from the Egg: he revealed and brought into the light everything that had previously lain hidden in the silver Egg -- in other words, the whole world. Up above was a void, the Sky. Down below was the Rest. Our ancient language has a word for the void, "Chaos," which simply means that it "yawns." Originally there was no word meaning turmoil or confusion: "Chaos" acquired this second meaning only later, after the introduction of the doctrine of the Four Elements. Thus the Rest, down below the Egg, was not in turmoil. According to another form of this story, the earth lay down below in the Egg, and the sky and the earth married. This was the work of the god Eros, who brought them into the light and then compelled them to mingle. They produced a brother and sister, Okeanos and Tethys.

The old tale, as told in our seagirt lands, probably went on to relate that originally Okeanos was down below in the Egg, and that he was not alone there but was accompanied by Tethys, and that these two were the first to act under the compulsion of Eros. As is stated in a poem by Orpheus: "Okeanos, the beautifully flowing, was the first to enter into marriage: he took to wife Tethys, his sister by the same Mother." This Mother of them both was she who had laid the silver Egg: she was Night.*

--Carl Kerenyi, Gods of the Greeks